It is a dark and stormy night. You are home all alone and the phone rings while you are watching the latest horror flick. You jump out of your seat; a little scared and walk to the phone.

But you missed it and they hung up on your voice mail. You look down at the caller ID and see a strange phone number with an unfamiliar area code.

What do you do?

Most people would call that number back. But you forget I am a geek and I like to do things a little differently. I would grab my tablet and bring up the website Who Called Us.

This website allows you to type in the number that called you and see what other people know about this phone number.

I don’t know how helpful this site is but it lets you know that you are not alone and the phone calls are not coming from “INSIDE THE HOUSE!”.

So you pop in that number that called you. In my case it was 425-391-5973. A quick search revealed that 36 other people had recently gotten similar calls from this number and a few people actually got someone on the line preaching about extended auto warranties.

Now I don’t have to worry that some random old friend is trying to send me secret messages by hanging up the phone in a specific sequential order…

I can simply curse out the voice spammers under my breath and add my comment to the WhoCalled.us list.

According to their website, here are their statistics from the last 3 years:

There have been 612237 calls reported in total.
The last 100 calls are shown below.

This database of calls has been graciously provided by the community.
Thank you for taking the time to add to the pool of knowledge.

That is pretty impressive and this website can be a great resource to everyone in the United States. Do you guys in other countries have a similar tool? How do you deal with Voice Spam?

I've used them before, but it really doesn't help knowing WHO. I've got both my phones on the 'Do Not Call Registry, but those same people, the ones pushing the warranties, call both lines many times a week. They bedevil everyone in the Tucson area, and yet the thousands of complaints haven't made them 'cease and desist'. The strangest part is they start giving their spiel the moment voice mail answers, so it's like a third of the way through before it starts being recorded. I've answered their calls on both phones, told them I'm not interested and to stop calling, but they don't. In fact, that is the only company I'm still getting telemarketing calls from on either line. I wish there was something we could do about them. For some reason they seem impervious to the law.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Another good website for the same thing is 800notes.com, which does essentially the same thing. It was very useful, since I recently started getting random calls from people, telemarketers, so I found via 800notes.com and so i put my cell number on the national DO-NOT-CALL list, and so now I get even more calls... really annoying...

Karl L. Gechlik here from AskTheAdmin.com doing a weekly guest blogging spot for our new found friends at MakeUseOf.com. I run my own consulting company, manage AskTheAdmin.com and work a full 9 to 5 job on Wall Street as a System Administrator.